Coronavirus Conjuncture: Nationalism and Pandemic States

Abstract

Writing from Britain in the month of May 2020, this essay draws the multiple and conflicting alignments of the Covid-19 moment into conjunctural relief. It seeks to understand how prominent trends of welfarism, collectivism and capitalism are being reorganised across a Left–Right spectrum and to specifically situate nationalism in this general political flux. Focusing on Britain, the essay will explore how an otherwise unsettled ruling Right is reviving a nationalist political imagination through a pandemic consciousness – with an emphasis on the politics of bordering, the spectre of China, reheated civic patriotism, a poetics of survival and melancholic whiteness. The essay will however also speculate about the limits to nationalism amid the imperatives of global pandemics.